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Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

Deep reinforcement learning in partially observable environments is a difficult task in itself, and can be further complicated by a sparse reward signal. Most tasks involving navigation in three-dimensional environments provide the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Matvey Gerasyov , Ilya Makarov

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

Intrinsically motivated goal exploration algorithms enable machines to discover repertoires of policies that produce a diversity of effects in complex environments. These exploration algorithms have been shown to allow real world robots to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-11 Alexandre Péré , Sébastien Forestier , Olivier Sigaud , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

Multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) aims to qualify the agent to accomplish multi-goal tasks, which is of great importance in learning scalable robotic manipulation skills. However, reward engineering always requires strenuous efforts in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Deyu Yang , Hanbo Zhang , Xuguang Lan , Jishiyu Ding

As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Elizabeth Bates , Vasilios Mavroudis , Chris Hicks

The broader application of reinforcement learning (RL) is limited by challenges including data efficiency, generalization capability, and ability to learn in sparse-reward environments. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Octavio Pappalardo , Rodrigo Ramele , Juan Miguel Santos

While using shaped rewards can be beneficial when solving sparse reward tasks, their successful application often requires careful engineering and is problem specific. For instance, in tasks where the agent must achieve some goal state,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Alexander Trott , Stephan Zheng , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher

In the early stages of human life, babies develop their skills by exploring different scenarios motivated by their inherent satisfaction rather than by extrinsic rewards from the environment. This behavior, referred to as intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

We study the role of intrinsic motivation as an exploration bias for reinforcement learning in sparse-reward synergistic tasks, which are tasks where multiple agents must work together to achieve a goal they could not individually. Our key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Rohan Chitnis , Shubham Tulsiani , Saurabh Gupta , Abhinav Gupta

The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in autonomous cyber defence agents based on deep reinforcement learning. Such agents are typically trained in a cyber gym environment, also known as a cyber simulator, at least 32 of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Elizabeth Bates , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

The success of popular algorithms for deep reinforcement learning, such as policy-gradients and Q-learning, relies heavily on the availability of an informative reward signal at each timestep of the sequential decision-making process. When…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-26 Tanmay Gangwani , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

We study the problem of online multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in environments with sparse rewards, where reward feedback is not provided at each interaction but only revealed at the end of a trajectory. This setting, though…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 The Viet Bui , Tien Mai , Hong Thanh Nguyen

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for teaching robots new behaviour. However, one of its main limitations is the need for carefully hand-coded reward signals by an expert. We argue that it is crucial to automate the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Abdalkarim Mohtasib , Gerhard Neumann , Heriberto Cuayahuitl

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-10 M. Tuluhan Akbulut , Utku Bozdogan , Ahmet Tekden , Emre Ugur